New Eocene primate from Myanmar shares dental characters with African Eocene crown anthropoids

Abstract

Recent discoveries of older and phylogenetically more primitive basal anthropoids in Chinaand Myanmar, the eosimiiforms, support the hypothesis that Asia was the place of origins ofanthropoids, rather than Africa. Similar taxa of eosimiiforms have been discovered in the latemiddle Eocene of Myanmar and North Africa, reflecting a colonization event that occurredduring the middle Eocene. However, these eosimiiforms were probably not the closestancestors of the African crown anthropoids. Here we describe a new primate from the middleEocene of Myanmar that documents a new clade of Asian anthropoids. It possesses severaldental characters found only among the African crown anthropoids and their nearest rela-tives, indicating that several of these characters have appeared within Asian clades beforebeing recorded in Africa. This reinforces the hypothesis that the African colonization ofanthropoids was the result of several dispersal events, and that it involved more derived taxathan eosimiiforms